Episodes

Today on Build, Maggie sits down with Justin Dilley, Head of Product at FullStory, a customer experience data platform. Before he joined FullStory, Justin jumped into the world of product management after business school first at Amazon where he worked on their payments and Kindle teams. Then it was back to the east coast where he joined Home Depot’s mobile team before making the move to FullStory. Together Maggie and Justin discuss the “why” behind what we build as product people and how to...

Today on Build, host Maggie Crowley chats live in the Seeking Wisdom studio with Acquia’s SVP Products, Matt Kaplan. Matt was previously CPO and GM, Emerging Products at LogMeIn. Now at Acquia, he heads up product strategy, management and design across their digital experience platform. And, fun fact, he was on MIT’s gymnastic team back in the day. Together Maggie and Matt chat through how great products are like great stories. Specifically, what makes a great story, untangling the...

On this episode of Build, host Maggie Crowley chats with Rahul Vohra, founder & CEO of Superhuman. Rahul is also the founder of beloved Gmail plugin Rapportive. Shortly after its founding, the company was acquired by LinkedIn where Rahul ran email integrations. During those years, he developed an intimate perspective of the email space – and its many problems. Enter Superhuman, Rahul's current company, built to be the fastest email experience ever made. Together they discuss how to measure...

On this episode of Build, host Maggie Crowley dives deep into conversation design with Google's Head of Conversation Design Outreach, Cathy Pearl. So what is conversation design exactly? Think teaching computers to communicate like humans (not robots) across voice interfaces and via typing, swiping and tapping. Cathy shares why now is the time to invest in conversation design and where and how to get started. Tune in for more from Maggie and Cathy. Before you go leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review and...

On today’s episode of Build, Maggie sits down with Drift’s VP of Product, Craig Daniel, to discuss how to ship product – what it takes to hit your dates (and the importance of committing to them publicly), using tracer bullets to de-risk features, “good / better / best” tiering to scope features and the importance of naming conventions. Also in this episode, how Product Managers can progress in their careers and how to get features built by your team if you’re not on product. Hint: Talk to...

Today on Build, host Maggie Crowley sits down with Christina Wodtke, author of the legendary book Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results, which Maggie describes as the best book on goal setting – ever. In the episode, Maggie and Christina, dive deep into Christina’s experience in product roles at MySpace, Zynga and Linkedin, her transition out of industry and into academia as a lecturer at Standford, and of course using Objectives and Key Results...

Together they discuss what Product Evangelist actually means. Plus the importance of value creation over output, how to implement the pull system, why limiting your product backlog is a good idea and much more. Before you go leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review and share the pod with your friends! Be sure to check out more insights on the Drift blog at drift.com/blog and find us on Twitter @maggiecrowley, @drift, @seekingwisdomio and @johncutlefish.

On today's episode of Build, host Maggie Crowley sits down with Richard Banfield, CEO and co-founder of Fresh Tilled Soil, a leading user interface design and experience agency, and co-author of Product Leadership, the manual Maggie lives her life by. On this episode, Richard dives deep into how to build high performing product teams. Be sure to tune in for actionable insights you can apply to your own team today. Before you go leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review and share the pod with your friends! Be...

It's a special crossover episode of Build! And the first episode in our brand new dedicated feed. Today's guest? Dave Gerhardt, Drift's VP of Marketing. Dave discusses his one week spent as a product manager at Drift plus, the real meat of this episode – how to write good copy and tell a story with your product. Copywriting and storytelling are key to product management. If you can't tell the story and motivate your team, they won't know where to go next. On this episode of Build, how to...

On this episode of #Build, board advisor and Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, Julia Austin, shares her point of view on what makes a truly great product manager. How does she know? Well years of experience spent as CTO at Digital Ocean and VP of Engineering at VMWare and Akamai. Julia also opens up about her time as a lecturer at Harvard Business School and experience serving as a board advisor to startups including Drift, Wistia, Help Scout, ZappRx and others. Before you go leave...

What do you do about failure? I’m not talking about a test that you took that failed. I’m talking about true product failures. Products that, for whatever reason, just bombed. Failures far outside the acceptable scope of “fail fast.”

Every employee wants to feel like they’re a part of a truly autonomous team. A team where they’re a part of the decision making process. A team where their voice matters. Where their opinions can make a difference. Maybe you’ve never been a part of a team like this. Or maybe you’ve only been a part of teams like this. Regardless, autonomy is something that everybody wants. But what does it look like in the real world?

In this one, Maggie shares a recent Tweet that got her the most impressions she’s ever had—and her first internet troll. It went something like this: “Stop wasting time talking about tools and backlogs. It doesn’t matter. Go talk to your sales team, figure out what hurdles they’re running into, and solve for them.” Listen in to hear why this struck such a nerve in the product community. On Twitter @maggiecrowley and @seekingwisomio

The most important thing we can all do as product people is also something that most of us continue to fail at: talking to customers. Getting customer feedback is an example of something that’s simple, but not easy. It’s incredible that talking to customers and getting feedback is the one thing that we all know is the key to building great products—but apparently we don’t all do it. Luckily, there’s a way to massively increase the amount of feedback that you’re getting if you open up your...

In this one Pratima Arora, Head of Product at Confluence, discussed how she scaled two product teams - one for Salesforce and one for Atlassian, bringing genuine diversity to her teams at both companies in the process.

Maybe you're in product dev, maybe you’re in marketing. Either way, you have customers, and your goal is to provide value for them, drive revenue, and surpass goals. Chances are, you’ve seen someone miss it. Maybe you’ve missed it. Sandhya’s path went from IIT Bombay to Stanford GSB, to founding her own startup to her current role as VP of Marketing at Amplitude. She’s never really been one to miss it. She joined us on our latest #Build, Seeking Wisdom podcast to pull knowledge from every...

Pluralsight's Nate Walkingshaw literally wrote the book on product leadership. On this episode of Build, Nate dives into the importance of empathy in product and how his own background as an EMT helped him build more empathetic, more intuitive products. Plus, Nate shares his framework for the "product heart" – all of the key elements for what a healthy product should look like. In this episode: 00:35 - Nate’s journey from EMT to Chief Experience Officer (CXO) at Pluralsight 1:48 - Inventing...

It’s a special episode of #Build. Host Maggie Crowley is joined by members of Drift’s Product and Engineering teams. Meet Alexa Nguyen, Senior Product Manager, Trevor Rundell, Director of Engineering, and Peter Karl II, Lead, Product Efficiency. The group chats through how product and engineering can work together most efficiently. That means breaking through the perception that engineers should be wholly removed from the customer. To tackle this problem at Drift, tech leads here are...

On today’s episode of #Build, host Maggie Crowley sits down with Joff Redfern, VP of Product at Atlassian. Together they talk through Joff’s time as VP of Product at LinkedIn, building a product org from 12 people to 650, the concept of a shipyard, why talent is priority 0, why he chose to join Atlassian and much more. Before you go leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review and share the pod with your friends! Be sure to check out more insights on the Drift blog at drift.com/blog and find us on Twitter...

Experience and a fancy degree can only get you so far. If you've listened to DC, you've probably caught that he doesn't exactly love hiring product managers with experience and those with their MBAs. They don't give you the right to tell people what to do; all they can do is help you get your foot in the door (he says). But that's where Maggie breaks the mold. Maggie is a Product Manager at Drift, has her MBA from Harvard Business School -- and oh yeah -- she's a former Olympian. And now...

Duration:00:08:04

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